Conscription and Military Manpower

What it is

Conscription, also called the draft or compulsory military service, is a legal mechanism requiring citizens, typically males between 18 and 30, to serve a fixed period in the armed forces. Service lengths in active systems range from two months (Croatia's 2026 programme) to 32 months (Israeli male citizens in the Israel Defense Forces). Governments use conscription when voluntary recruiting cannot meet force-size targets, or when they want to build a large trained reserve at lower cost than a fully professional force. These two logics are distinct: a draft aimed at reserve depth can tolerate shorter service and lower initial readiness standards.

History

Conscription became mass policy during the Napoleonic Wars, when France mobilized citizens as soldiers at industrial scale for the first time in modern European history. By the First World War it was nearly universal among belligerents. The Cold War embedded it in NATO doctrine, with most Western European states maintaining large conscript armies through the 1980s. After the Soviet collapse, Germany suspended its Wehrpflicht in 2011; France had already ended its draft in 2001. Most of Western Europe followed through the 1990s and 2000s, converting to professional all-volunteer forces on the theory that quality and reach mattered more than mass. Outside Europe, Israel (since 1948), South Korea (since 1957), and Taiwan maintained compulsory service through the post-Cold War era. The United States ended conscription in 1973 following the Vietnam War, retaining only mandatory Selective Service registration for males aged 18 to 25.

Current state

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reversed the Western European trend. By mid-2026, ten EU member states operate some form of mandatory military service: Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, and Croatia, which reinstated a two-month basic-training programme in January 2026. Latvia's reinstatement, the most recent before Croatia's, took effect in January 2024. Germany's Bundestag passed the Wehrdienstgesetz in December 2025, bringing mandatory medical screening for all 18-year-old male citizens into force on January 1, 2026, alongside a voluntary-expansion track. France is phasing in a 10-month voluntary national service, with 3,000 participants enrolled in summer 2026 and a target of 50,000 annually by 2035.

Outside Europe, Taiwan extended compulsory service from four months to one year in January 2024, citing threat assessments related to China's military posture. South Korea requires 18 to 21 months for male citizens. Israel's system, which covers 32 months for men and 24 for women, is under political strain following a June 2024 Israeli Supreme Court ruling that the longstanding exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men has no legal basis, creating a conscription crisis that the Knesset had not resolved as of mid-2026.

Russia is a category apart. The Kremlin's announced partial mobilization in September 2022 called up 300,000 reservists. Since then, Russian authorities have relied on a mix of voluntary contracts, regional cash bonuses, and prison-recruitment drives to avoid a second formal mobilization wave. In parallel, a June 2026 decree doubled military training class time in all Russian state schools to 50% of instruction hours, building a long-term manpower pipeline without the political cost of announced conscription.

Relationships

Conscription policy connects directly to NATO's documented manpower shortfall versus Cold War-era force levels. Frontline states, especially Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, argue that their reserve-based conscript models are the practical template for European collective defence. The debate also overlaps with the Russian school militarization story: Moscow is solving a manpower problem through institutional depth and youth conditioning rather than a third public mobilization, a strategy visible across the border in Estonia and Finland's own reserve-building rationale.

What to watch

• Whether Germany's hybrid scheme generates enough trained reservists to close the Bundeswehr's acknowledged gap by 2030, given that the new law stops short of actual mandatory service
• Any expansion of Taiwan's conscript pool to women, which Taiwan's government floated in 2024 but has not legislated
• Israel's ultra-Orthodox conscription crisis: whether the Knesset passes new legislation or the Israel Defense Forces absorb the manpower gap by reducing standards
• A second Russian mobilization announcement, which polling inside Russia indicates would be deeply unpopular but may become operationally unavoidable if war losses continue at current rates